Word: oscared
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Will any child want to jump out of bed on Christmas morning and rush off to a Quentin Tarantino film? Can Wag the Dog possibly be mistaken for a Snoopy holiday special? Does the 19th century Australia of Oscar and Lucinda have nearly the same Christmas kick as Scrooge's London? And Woody Allen, musing on death and betrayal--now there's the cure for seasonal depression...
...release of ambitious films at year's end has nothing to do with noel and everything to do with the Dec. 31 deadline for Academy Award qualifiers. While real people flock to Scream 2, movie people begin their homework by seeing Oscar contenders. Most of these films don't open till Christmas, but we can't wait. Here are five shiny baubles for right now. IT'S PULP, BUT IT AIN'T QUITE PULP FICTION...
...behold and an image to cherish--a little country church, improbably fashioned out of glass and wrought iron, bobbing down an untamed river deep in the 19th century Australian wilderness. How in the world did it and the man delivering it--a nice, pious (if defrocked) clergyman named Oscar Hopkins (Ralph Fiennes)--end up in these unlikely precincts...
Logically enough, if your definition of the logical encompasses the inherent illogic of human passion. For gangly Oscar, nervous yet nervy in Fiennes' gloriously addled performance, is a gambling man. Gambling is an activity that, as he sees it, permits him leaps and tests of faith, with all his winnings going to churchly charities. He has bet that he can deliver this fragile edifice by a certain date despite the roughness of both the country and the crew that's helping with the tugging and hauling...
...know where OSCAR AND LUCINDA is heading--toward the kind of happy, reconciling ending that usually crowns romantic period adventures. Don't get too comfortable with that thought. For this story, adapted from Peter Carey's Booker Prize-winning novel by Laura Jones and directed by Gillian Armstrong, is as wayward as its main characters--comic, fierce, digressive. Its business is to turn sure-thing expectations into a game of chance, and provide us with that rarity--a genuinely eccentric yet deeply insinuating film. --By Richard Schickel...